TL;DR: Apple dominates the US smartphone market, but EU regulations may offer Android a chance for resurgence by enforcing messaging interoperability and standardizing hardware features.
100% of iPhone users have iMessage. And they can use the same app to talk to 100% of their contacts.
Fragmentation is a huge problem for everything else. What percentage of Android users have any particular one of those apps you listed?
I only grudgingly install WhatsApp when I travel to Europe. Discordv and Slack are not really competitors in this space (though I’m sure there’s a small subset of users who use them that way). I have Signal and Telegram and yet I still use SMS with most of my contacts because that’s the only one that is guaranteed to work.
I’ve tried getting my friends onto Signal, with some amount of success. But many have eventually stopped using it because I was the only one they used it with. A couple of my iPhone-using family members reported that they stopped getting notifications from Signal because they used it so infrequently that iOS basically disabled it (I guess it does that after a month of disuse but I’m not sure exactly).
It’s a losing battle. We’ve fallen back to SMS.
Fragmentation is a huge problem for everything else. What percentage of Android users have any particular one of those apps you listed?
WhatApp is installed on little bit under 100% among all Android phones and iPhones in most EU countries and should the EU actually tackle messenger interoperability, iMessage is definitively not the main target. The most die-hard Apple fans I know use iMessage for a little bit when new features were introduced. Then they go back to WhatsApp like everybody else.
To be clear: I’m not an advocate of WhatApp here, I’m merely explaining that the EU does not care at all about Apple’s chat service nobody in the EU uses. Should any legislation even affect iMessage, it’ll be more coincidental, not targeted at it.
I don’t know about the rest of the world but in the UK text messages used to cost 10p for each one you send. Multimedia messages were like 40p. Really expensive. WhatsApp came about and made both of these free. The rest is history.
Ironically, SMS are generally free these days but nobody obviously uses them. My SMS app is just full of OTP codes being sent to me.
This seems to have happened in most of the world. The US still sticks to SMS because it is free since before chat apps became a thing. SMS was a terrible experience because you would pay per message thanks to carriers’ greed. It didn’t keep up with the demand for constant communication.
Nowadays in Brazil SMS is also free, but by the point they did that, WhatsApp had already become ubiquitous, and had much better features such as sending location, consistent experience with features over different devices, group chats with moderation, voice messages, free voice calls to any user over the world, etc., besides being built from scratch as an SMS substitute (would simply use your mobile number). No one would willingly go back to SMS.
Seems like only some Asian countries defaulted to a different app such as Kakao Talk. I remember Kik Messenger was quite popular back then, but it was more like an anonymous chat app.
A couple of my iPhone-using family members reported that they stopped getting notifications from Signal because they used it so infrequently that iOS basically disabled it
THE BEST OS ever /s
It’s so dumb. I have the same problem. I have an iPhone and I try to get them to use Signal, but they just keep using SMS and we keep getting garbage video being sent over group text since some of the group uses Android. When I complain they start putting stuff in Google Photo Albums instead of just using a decent messenger.
